BIOGRAPHY

ANDROLINKLATER HIS OWN GUINEA PIG

SUFFERANDSURVIVE: GASATTACKS, MINERS’ CANARIES, SPACESUITSANDTHEBENDS– THEEXTREMELIFEOFDRJ S HALDANE

★By Martin Goodman (Simon & Schuster 422pp £14.99)

SCIENCEIS ANaccumulative body of knowledge, and what was once an astounding breakthrough quickly becomes background information. Three pages in a standard A-level biology textbook can teach you about the helical structure of DNA, whose discovery won a Nobel Prize for Crick and Watson fifty years ago, while two paragraphs are enough for John Scott Haldane’s century-old work in understanding how we breathe. Yet Haldane deserves to be celebrated not only for his discoveries, but for the manner in which he practised science. Nothing demonstrates his approach better than the way he made the miner’s canary a safety device. Any tiny creature would have served as well. Investigating mine explosions and sewer poisonings in the late nineteenth century, where carbon monoxide and other lethal gases lurked invisibly in the air, Haldane himself usually carried a mouse. With a metabolic rate twenty times that of a human, it reacted within seconds to gases that would take minutes to kill a person. Miners kept canaries, however. To encourage them to use their pets as safety devices, Haldane devised a square cage that allowed the surrounding air to get in but, once the bird collapsed telling the miner to race for safety, automatically became an enclosed box with its own reviving oxygen supply. Thus he ensured that the canary would survive, as well as its owner. To determine exactly how much time men and birds had, Haldane experimented by sealing himself in a lead coffin and breathing in different quantities of carbon monoxide; he would test his blood and breath until he fell unconscious. His personal example was as persuasive as his science. Born in 1860, and brought up in a Perthshire family whose motto was the terse instruction ‘Suffer’, the tweed-suited, walrus-moustached, and admirably idiosyncratic Haldane learned medicine in Edinburgh and philosophy in Jena, becoming both an experimentalist

MADegree in Biography Starting January 2007

and an idealist. In this fascinating biography, Martin Goodman speculates that listening to the laboured breathing of an adored elder brother as he died of diphtheria led Haldane to specialise in respiration, but it is also true that he found himself attracted to studying the metaphysical point at which the breath, the pneuma or spirit, entered the body. Too sceptical and contrary to accept the constraints of academic life, Haldane found an alternative university in the field of public health, and a laboratory in overcrowded slums, factories and mines. Among late Victorians, not even Henry Mayhew had a more complete knowledge of the poor than Haldane, from the air they breathed to the faeces they excreted. Breathing is so fundamental to life that we rarely think about it. That may be just as well, given the complexity of the process by which nitrogen and oxygen, in a ratio of four to one, are transferred from the environment to the blood, and in exchange nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide are returned to the environment. The focus of Haldane’s research was the manner in which haemoglobin, the iron-red protein that gives blood its colour, combines with such gases as oxygen, carbon dioxide and, most readily of all, carbon monoxide, and carries them to different parts of the brain and body. The ‘Haldane effect’ describes the critically important seesaw mechanism that allows haemoglobin to take up more carbon dioxide as it loses oxygen, and to carry more oxygen as it releases carbon dioxide. His discoveries not only made life safer for miners and slumdwellers, but enable today’s divers, mountaineers and astronauts to breathe artificial gases at greater depths,

Haldane: a breath of fresh air

Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MAin Biography was the first postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK.

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Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007